EDITORIAL: Obama, Congress and the next four years

In this Feb. 20, 2009, photo, President Barack Obama listens as Vice President Joe Biden speaks in the East Room of the White House. Asked to name the one step they'd push most urgently if they were the newly re-elected President Barack Obama, a dozen leading economists advise President Barack Obama to sidestep the "fiscal cliff" during his second term of office. Economists say that the package of tax increases and deep spending cuts that will take effect in January unless Congress reaches a budget deal by then, could tip the U.S. economy back into recession next year. (AP Photo)

In the wake of the recent voting, however, many commentators have remarked on the seeming stasis of American politics: Congress and the presidency will remain just as they were -- a Democratic president, a Democratic-controlled Senate, and a Republican-controlled House.

Four more years, indeed, they say -- of gridlock.

Perhaps not.

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After four years of determined GOP obstructionism in Congress and efforts by many conservatives to mythologize Barack Obama as a foreigner, a Muslim, a racist, a socialist and an angry anti-colonialist, perhaps it's now time for them to recognize his presidency not as a one-off anomaly, but as a legitimate product of the presidential electoral system.

Such recognition will be a stretch. To this point, the conservative echo machine of Fox News, talk radio, books and even a movie has been nothing if not self-deluding.

During Obama's first term, conservatives worked themselves into an absolute froth of conviction that all they had to do was hold out for four years and their largely self-imposed nightmare would be over.

SOME are at it again, suggesting the loss by Mitt Romney came not because the party had swung too far from the middle, but, rather, because the candidate was not conservative enough.

True, Romney was flexible and pragmatic as a governor. But he swung far to the right to win the party's nomination, blithely confident that he could, in the infamous words of a top campaign adviser, "Etch-A-Sketch" his primary campaign record and start over once he had clinched the nomination.

Obama and his top political adviser, David Axlerod, made sure he couldn't.

Instead, Romney and his party alienated women and Hispanics.

With unemployment still hovering around 8 percent, it was supposed to be a walkover win for Republicans, with the GOP taking both the presidency and control of the Senate. Instead, Obama won a second term and Democrats have added a couple of seats to their majority in the Senate.

The Republican Party did fabulously well with its self-defined base, which consists almost exclusively of white voters, especially those who are male and elderly. And they got those voters out in great numbers.

That's actually the bad news, not the good, because not only did they still lose, but that base is steadily shrinking as a proportion of the overall electorate.

Now, as Republicans search for answers, there are some top strategists who seriously think the problem is confined to how the party communicates and its tactics.

ARE they kidding?

Republicans can't keep obstructing immigration reform and not expect it to bite back at the ballot box, where fully 10 percent of voters were Hispanic.

They can't talk about rape as it were just one of those unfortunate things that sometimes happens, like breaking a shoelace, and not expect female voters to respond.

And they can't talk about defaulting on the sovereign debt of the United States as if they were walking away from a house bought with an adjustable rate, no-doc loan from a storefront mortgage mill.

No, the problem is not the messaging or the tactics of the party. The problem is the party has sustained itself on a narrow politics of anger without recognizing there is an endgame.

This nation has some serious issues it must address and it is going to require some compromise that could actually do the GOP some good, too.

RIGHT AWAY, there is the federal deficit and the scheduled tax increases and spending cuts, which are too drastic. Obama must step up to the plate and propose a specific, balanced plan, including Medicare reform, and the GOP must respond affirmatively with something other than an outright refusal to consider tax increases.

We need to reform immigration policy, instead of using it as a political beanbag.

Manmade climate change, the most serious issue of our age and a matter of scientific consensus, needs to be taken seriously by the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, not treated as a fiction.